I was wary of the mRNA shot for the reasons @desertshores mentioned. Felt compelled to take A sort of shot because I fly to Europe yearly and didn’t want to sacrifice that so I opted for the J&J to be one-and-done but even that later turned out to have potential negative effects as an adenovirus vaccine. I think they’re just less studied in terms of side effect profile because it wasn’t as popular. When the boosters came out I thought it was a total scam to try to cover the glaring fact that the effectiveness was much lower than had been advertised. Never took one. I’m not sure if I ever got COVID as I only had one bout of sickness that seemed like it could be COVID but I tested negative on the rapid test (didn’t do the pcr test as it seemed madness to go to a clinic and probably catch COVID if I didn’t have it already just to get a diagnosis). Anyway my could-have-been COVID was like a pretty bad cold for about 5 days then it was gone. I did have some brain fog for months honestly but it faded with time. It reminded me of what it felt to have Mono a few years prior, but way less bad.
My husband who got on the vaccine bandwagon got a booster and felt pretty crappy from it. And he caught COVID twice (mild).
Get this: we have 4 school aged daughters who were in semi mandatory pooled testing at school. I insisted they never get the shots because whatever the risk / reward calculus in adults, it seemed there’d be marginally zero delta in protection for healthy children and only risks of the unknown. They were among very very few kids at school whose parents refused the jab.
ALL of their friends who were vaccinated caught COVID. Many of them multiple times. My daughters never caught it. It would have popped up even if they were asymptomatic due to the pooled testing. Also they had higher odds than most as they were each exposed to ~20 different classmates and could have caught it from each other at home. Most of their friends have far fewer siblings to catch it from. They also didn’t catch it from me (if indeed I had it) or my husband when he definitely had it. And we never masked them unless absolutely under the gun to.
So according to my n=4 or n=6 experiment the more shots / boosters per capita in my family, the higher the incidence of COVID.
While big pharma has provided some wonder drugs and vaccines, they have also provided some terrible ones with adverse outcomes for those early adopters.
For example Vioxx:
“Vioxx is considered to be the largest drug recall in history and one that elicited one of the greatest public outcries. Vioxx, prescribed to more than 20 million people as a pain reliever for arthritis, was found to be responsible for increased risk of heart attack and stroke.”
Does anyone remember Fen-Phen? “To date, over 50,000 victims have filed suit against Wyeth; the company lost an estimated $21 billion to legal defenses and damages for Fen-Phen.”
So, my point is, I don’t trust big pharma. The thing I don’t trust is their motives. They are primarily profit driven and that is a fact. They donate millions each year to politicians of both parties to protect and promote their interests.
I think in years to come we will find the Covid-19 vaccine scam was one of the biggest frauds in drug history. It was a perfect example of collusion between politicians and big pharma.
So, if you got your shots and had no ill effects and did not catch covid fine, but millions of people took the shots and still got covid. That is a fact. I took three and now I regret it. There is still no telling what the long-term effects of RNA vaccines are. The fact no one was given permission to use them until 2020 when the government used its emergency power to give big pharma permission to use them, is telling. The technology has been around since 1960.
Will RNA vaccines be a big boon to mankind? It’s too early to tell. Many drugs’ harmful effects did not show up until years later after they were introduced.
I agree 100%. I work in a hospital and was pretty much forced by the democrats to get the vaccines or I would have been fired. I have a family to provide for so I did what I thought I had to do at the time. But, I wish I would have fought it harder. I regret my two vaccines. I didn’t get COVID until about 3 months after the vaccines.
Who would have thought that there would be so many antivaxxers here
Anyway I got pfizer jab in December 2020, as soon as it was possible. I got two moderna boosters later. I was working with patients throughout the covid mandates, mostly without mask. I got infected just once, early 2022, the infection lasted exactly one hour. I got fever, muscle ache and tested positive and in the morning I felt ok, was completely healthy but positive for next 5 days. All friends who got covid were mostly unvaccinated, their covid was usually a serious affair, similar to flu. One friend got long covid. One ended up with damaged lungs and had serious breathing problems for several months. One friend ended in hospital. My mother’s secretary ended up with lung transplantation (she was 45 no preexisting illness). She has died few months after second transplant.
Go figure why I believe vaccines do help.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I didn’t, nor did any others I have seen posting on the forum say they were anti-vaxxers.
We are merely questioning the long-term effects of the Covid vaccine.
I have already had this season’s flu shot, which is not a RNA vaccine. So, no, I am not an anti-vaxxer and it is not fair to call people who are questioning the Covid-19 vaccine anti-vaxxers.
NO vaccine prevents one from catching any virus - that’s just not how they work. They instead train the immune system to recognize and be ready to fight a virus before encountering it, resulting usually in a lighter and quicker recovery.
And there was no rush or short-cuts on the science - mRNA vaccines had been studied and tested for years, and are very well understood. The FDA under Trump just cut the administrative red tape (which normally adds many years to approval).
A huge difference between vaccines and drugs like Vioxx and Fen-Phen is that vaccines are taken once or occasionally (more if variants emerge). A vaccine IS a stressor - but it’s usually a one-off and doesn’t stick around causing long term issues. Unlike the actual virus itself of course. This is very different from drugs that are taken steadily over a long time.
There is emerging evidence that Covid doesn’t fully disappear btw, at least not after major illness. It appears to hide in the immune system itself - and this Bad. That’s how viruses like Hepatitis and HIV/AIDS work, causing damage to the immune system over time. Personally I am VERY eager to avoid this, and the risks from mRNA vaccines are miniscule (political grandstanding, conspiracy theory and hyperventilating aside) compared to actually incurring an illness with known and dangerous risks.
All my family and most friends have been fully vaccinated and boosted. A few have since caught Covid (not shocking since the vaccines don’t prevent transmission, just prime the immune response) but ALL have been very mild cases. Even my mother at 87 finally caught it and had a mild flu for a couple days and done. One friend caught it early on before the vaccines were out - he got long Covid and ooh boy that was scary! Even when he physically recovered it impacted his cognition and he was making weird and paranoid posts on Facebook. Fortunately he’s improved a lot but it took a couple years.
It’s a VERY common claim. “That person took the vaccine and they caught Covid anyway - VACCINES DON’T WORK!”
I’m muting this topic. People get WAY too weird about it, and it’s a bit disturbing to see so much anti-science misinformation on a forum that is otherwise science-centric.
You folks appear to represent the two extremes of opinion on the COVID vaccine and will therefore never agree. I sit in the middle not understanding either extreme.
Well someone asks why so few people get all the COVID boosters. Those who haven’t taken them explain their reasons why. The point isn’t to convert someone to my point of view Re: the boosters or vaccine. It’s to explain my reasons for why I didn’t get the boosters. You may not agree with my reasoning. The point is to understand it.
The capacity to entertain an idea without adopting it is the mark of an educated mind — Aristotle or some other dead white guy.
Stan Gromkowski, a cellular immunologist who did work on mRNA vaccines in the early 1990s and views Malone as an underappreciated pioneer, put it this way: “He’s fucking up his chances for a Nobel Prize.”
I guess Stan was right. This wasn’t a flattering piece on Malone on the Atlantic. It sounded as if it was intended to bury him. But then and now that snippet stood out to me. The incentives, if one stood a chance at the Nobel Prize for this, were to keep one’s mouth shut about any possible adverse consequences.
I heard Malone speak even before the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s clearly brilliant in his field. That’s not to say he cannot be an absolute nutjob when he leaves his lane. Nor is such insanity incompatible with genius. I’ve learned a long time ago that human rationality is not necessarily transitive. People can believe insane shit that in my green salad says I used to take as litmus tests for disqualifying others from holding higher mental office. Yet concurrent with that they can be way better informed than me in other domains, better informed than virtually all mankind.
The anti-vaccine propaganda has been working to the degree where people who were even supportive of the first rounds are now hedging and thinking… well, do I REALLY need to re-up on this, do i REALLY want to be one of those people who is “scared” of the virus? I’ve seen it in pretty much all of my family members. All got the first rounds, but now they’re saying things like “why do they want us to get so many vaccines anyway?”
FWIW whoever started the “you won’t get covid if you get the vaccine” and the “getting vaccinated stops you from spreading it” memes did a lot of damage to the public trust as well. That was overpromising something that wasn’t known. Vaccines give immunity. Immunity isn’t absolute and very few vaccines 100% prevent people from ever contracting something or spreading it. But they DO give your immune system a chance to prepare for the pathogen and be ready to fight it, which has been a huge benefit to society. People who got the vaccines are much less likely to die and much less likely to develop serious cases of Covid.
One person’s anti vaXX propaganda is another progressive European country’s (not even Sweden) policy, and they must be doing something right public health wise as they’re years ahead of the US in life expectancy.
